Wang Haichuan’s creative style is in some ways not unlike a phenomenon common in the avant-garde poetry of the 1980s and 90s, in which poets and artists hoping to avoid clichés and stale expressions either circumspectly or directly rejected the use of beautiful diction and aesthetics to freshly reorganize and understand the world. Thus, a dense but seemingly unrelated collection of concepts and possibilities interwove to produce new language and paths forward; the leaps and flows of information seemed unexpected and turbulent, and the splintered collage of juxtapositions appeared absurd or bizarre as common logic was breached. However, with the aid of its own internal rhetoric and spiritual rebuilding, the features and layers of meaning presented by such works were rich and fertile, in a complex but expansive space that often possessed the subtle depth of the theatrical and allegorical. With this, it became more possible to read or observe the intense estrangement of personal experience. In this sense, Wang Haichuan’s paintings can be seen as a kind of “writing via art.”
As an artist adept at capturing and utilizing images, Wang Haichuan extracts materials from the trenches of time, excavating memories from among the extensive threads of culture, and gathering fragments in order to interrogate the meaning of history as it extends into the present day. Simultaneously, because he lives amid the complex progressions of the current era, Wang Haichuan also pays close attention the present moment as it is permeated with the tremendous flow of news and data, observing the changes in our daily dose of information. With a kind of horizontal scanning and sifting, memory can be reproduced from all the widespread and immediate social events and unconstrained realities, and history and its corresponding echoes can be solidified.
The torrent of information flows unceasingly and is assembled in Wang Haichuan’s meticulously constructed paintings, where in the complex crisscrossing of architecture, art, religion, literature, and even epic poems of history and culture there are many encounters, like a sewing machine and umbrella on an operating table. At the same time, this also forms an artist’s vivid depiction of our contemporary era.
Zhang Er
Translated by Eleanor Goodman